Chart of all US frequency allocations (as of 2016, but there doesn't appear to be a more up to date one?): https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/januar...
"but" ???
Channels 70 to 83 to 1G cellular in 1983.
Channels 52 to 69 to 4G cellular in 2008.
Channels 38 to 51 to 4G/5G cellular in 2017.
The current allocation is channels 2 through 36. Channel 37 is not used.
Are enough people really willing to pay for the convenience of, I guess, not having to switch between antenna and cable input, or are living outside of broadcast coverage of the stations they care about?
Weirdly, it's exactly the opposite in Germany: Supposedly the public broadcasters have to pay the cable companies to get them to carry their programs.
That's what I've long suspected. No wonder it's a great opportunity to save/waste money :)
Supposedly in some social classes and age groups, broadcast TV is literally unheard of, with Best Buy promoting TV antennas accordingly ("free cable!") and people suspecting it's a scam or illegal.
broadcast is kinda uniquely positioned.
Home shopping is usually used to monetize excess bandwidth.
[1] - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
Broadcast TV still goes over the air, though it's digital now.
Digital television stations state what "channel" they are in their signal's meta data. That allows them to change frequencies but keep their channel identity. Since TV when digital, many stations have changed frequencies, some several times. You may find the "repacking" of the broadcast TV frequencies an interesting read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp...
This change opens up 1200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz.
> quite a lot of spectrum real estate
Amateur radio is scattered all over the place, but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz... ignoring the fact that they are tiny slices, the upper limit of bandwidth you can hope to gain under that frequency is 300 MHz (for all of it), and considering that most of that is not amateur radio, you are going to be gaining a negligible amount of bandwidth that cannot be practically used for a single application because it is not contiguous.
The higher the frequency the more bandwidth is available. For high throughput applications reclaiming these relatively low frequency bands is not useful.
The 70cm band (420-450MHz US) is heavily used. I'm sure cellular services would love it. On the other hand, it is a secondary allocation with other users (e.g. military radars) having priority.
The 23cm band is another secondary allocation, from 1240MHz to 1300MHz-- wide enough for 3 wifi channels. On the other hand, you'd have to kick out the radiolocation service, and it's not contiguous with a big block of channels to make it worthwhile.
Then above that amateur shares frequencies with some of wifi and then microwave frequencies that are so high that they are undesirable.
Wifi isn't necessarily a minimum of 20MHz. Wifi HaLow goes as low as 1 MHz.
The chart is logarithmically stacked, i.e. each row would fit into the one below 10 times, 100 times two rows down etc.
It is only valuable in the sense that it is a very limited resource.
That's exactly the point.
The small amateur radio spectrum allocations cover long-wave emissions that can communicate around the planet and short-wave emissions that engage local repeater networks.
Think of it as an insurance policy - communications backup when comm is a life & death matter. Doesn't happen often, but really important when it's needed.
[0]: https://www.arrl.org/amateur-radio-emergency-communication
Amateur radio is by its nature more decentralized. Even if you're using a higher frwquency and dependent on repeaters, they tend to be ran by individuals and independent groups, so you can probably find some way to get your signal through.
Let us have some so far neutral zone. Wi-Fi etc does not need those. I am not a radio guy. But let them have it.
Disasters warrant keeping the band for basic news and reporting if nothing else.
FM already has improved audio. Perhaps the same looser regs would bring more people in.
I have often demonstrated that with a thought experiment where there are two stations, one high quality but boring, the other crappy quality, but compelling.
Which one do most people listen to?
But, there is more to it than that. Higher fidelity opens the door for better AD rates and a broader array of appropriate programs.
A smaller number of stations = more per station, very generally speaking.
As well as that those bands are already heavily used already - it would make no sense to open these bands up to WiFi.